Overview

Built on the industry's first and leading application-aware storage architecture, Tintri VMstore addresses the mismatch between storage and virtualization. The result is a predictable and efficient environment that is capable of handling all of your virtualized applications and desktops, and an IT team that is free to focus on innovation.

Smart Storage that sees, learns and adapts to your VM environment

Set-up in minutes. No complex storage configuration or tuning required by only dealing with auto-aligned VMs and vDisks and not LUNs and volumes.

Get the performance of flash with the economics of high capacity HDD with Tintri FlashFirst™ design delivering 99% of IO from flash.

Serve thousands of different type of VMs from a single VMstore with VM-level QoS and performance isolation.

Tintri storage sees into the complete virtualization infrastructure so you can too

Get a global view of all VMs stored and identify performance and capacity trends without dealing with underlying storage.

Stay in control of VMs

Protect individual VMs with customizable policies for VM-level instant snapshots taking up no additional space and WAN-efficient replication requiring only a fraction of the bandwidth.

Create hundreds of high performance zero-space clones using Tintri's UI or API as well as virtualization tools locally or remotely to speed up VDI and dev/test projects.

Technology

Application-Aware Storage Architecture

Tintri VMstore is built on the industry's first application-aware storage architecture. This means it understands and operates on VMs and virtual disks — instead of conventional storage objects such as volumes and LUNs. All storage operations such as snapshots, clones, and replication are done at VM level, which eliminates the need to deal with underlying the complexity of traditional storage.

The innovation underlying the Tintri VMstore includes:

Storage Intelligence: VMstore leverages a patented and unique Tintri FlashFirst™ design for storing and serving VMs. This design approach leverages flash as a first-class storage medium as well as high capacity disk for storage density. Dedupe and compression increases the amount of data that can be stored in flash. The system actively tracks I/O for every VM and virtual disk keeping only the active data in flash. As a result 99% of all I/O is served from flash with average sub-millisecond latencies. VMs also benefit from transparent VM-level QoS, performance allocation and auto-alignment, which ensures predictable, consistent performance for all VMs with Zero Management.

Infrastructure Insight: VMstore provides a detailed view of performance including IOPS, throughput, latency and capacity utilization at the individual VM and virtual disk level without additional software or agents. The end-to-end view of latency is compiled from the hypervisor, the network and the VMstore itself, which is aware of every I/O request and the VM/vDisk it corresponds to. Administrators can detect performance and capacity trends and quickly identify performance trouble spots. The Tintri VAAI-NFS extended statistics primitive enables visibility into space usage on Tintri VMstore, especially for thin provisioned disks.

VM Control: VMstore allows for snapshot, clones and replication to operate at the VM level. Using a redirect-on-write architecture, space efficient VM snapshots have no impact on the system performance. Similarly replication of the VMs only sends compressed, deduplicated data between two systems reducing the network burden of replication by as much as 95%. With VAAI-NFS support, VMstore allows admins to take native space efficient clones of individual VMs from Tintri's UI and API as well as Hypervisor tools, accelerating projects such as VDI and test/dev.

High Availability and Enterprise Support

Tintri VMstore is designed to fully capitalize on the latest multi-level cell (MLC) flash technology. The patented Tintri FlashFirst™ design tackles the issues of write amplification, garbage collection and flash life/wear issues with careful management of VM data being written to flash and using flash-optimized dual parity RAID. This ensures data integrity and higher availability than traditional storage deployments involving SSDs.

On the system front, in addition to redundant components and connectivity the system makes use a dual-controller architecture in an active-standby configuration. This dual-controller setup ensures the system is serving VMs with no change in performance even if a failover occurs. As an added benefit, controller firmware updates and features like auto-alignment of VMs are non-disruptive in nature.

Tintri also provides proactive support with SSL-encrypted auto-support and one-click diagnostic data collection. Results are quickly and reliably sent via the cloud, enabling quick diagnosis and problem resolution without relying on e-mail and manual log file collection.

Tintri Advantage

Manage VMs directly

Spend less time managing and troubleshooting VM and storage interactions. Tintri VMstore™ is built on a application-aware storage architecture and eliminates complexity by relating the storage infrastructure directly to the VMs and business applications. There are no LUNs or volumes, tiers, RAID groups or other traditional storage objects that create complexity in a virtualized environment. Provisioning storage for VMs is simpler and faster. Virtualization administrators will feel right at home: The VM objects in VMstore are the same ones seen in the hypervisor, and the VMs and vDisks will be familiar to users.

Instant VM bottleneck visualization

Diagnose VM performance issues instantly. VM administrators dread troubleshooting performance bottlenecks. It is one of the most tedious VM management tasks. Triage meetings are often described as "pin the blame meetings." Is it the host, network, storage or something else? With Tintri VMstore, administrators now have easy, instant visibility — from the guest OS layer to the storage layer. They can see per-VM or per-vDisk latency at any infrastructure layer, identify the source of performance issues, and take immediate action. VMstore also maintains historical latency data automatically, giving administrators a graphical 30-day view of performance.

Performance isolation and QoS for VMs

Get the right quality of service for all your VMs. Since Tintri VMstore uses VM abstractions internally, it monitors and controls IO for each vDisk, to provide performance isolation and QoS at a VM and vDisk level. The Tintri file system maps each IO request—read, write and metadata operation—directly to a virtual disk. Tintri FlashFirst design allows VMs the right level of resources when they need it — without the complexity or cost of legacy shared storage systems. Unlike other storage solutions with a read-only flash cache, Tintri VMstore is designed from the ground-up as an integrated flash/disk architecture that can both read and write to flash, making full use of its potential to deliver the appropriate quality of service for each VM. As a result of the built-in quality of service VM workloads with different performance characteristics can all be consolidated on to a single storage system for efficient resource utilization and management simplicity and virtualization-resistant applications can be easily virtualized.

Assure performance for specific VMs and vDisks by pinning to flash. Tintri VMstore can isolate VMs and even individual vDisks that demand guaranteed performance by pinning them to flash. This assures performance for mission-critical applications or time-sensitive workloads, such as software builds.

Advanced VM-Granular Snapshots and Clones

With Tintri VMstore, you get fast, efficient storage level data protection with advanced per-VM snapshots and clones. Operations like cloning and snapshots are at the VM-level, which when combined with Tintri's inline deduplication and compression makes them extremely space and performance efficient. Default snapshot schedules protect every VM automatically, while custom schedules on a per VM basis allow users to meet their specific data protection needs. Tintri VMstore supports up to 128 snapshots per VM.

Tintri VMstore provides space-efficient clones at the VM level and clone VMs are immediately visible to the hypervisor management console through available APIs. In the case of VMware vCenter, customization templates can be also be applied to clones directly from the Tintri administrative tool. Advanced cloning with support for VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) lets you create hundreds of clones to support VDI, instant provisioning, and test and development environments from VMware management tools such as the VMware vSphere Client, VMware vCloud Director, and VMware View.

Simple, Flexible and High-Performance VM Replication

Protect and restore individual VMs with VM-granular replication. Enabling replication for a VM is as simple as checking a box. Restoring from replicated copies takes just a few mouse clicks and is as easy as restoring from a local copy. Per-VM, customizable data protection policies allow RPOs as low as 15 minutes and simplifies planning, monitoring and data protection policy changes.

Achieve dramatic WAN and storage efficiency with per-VM replication that only replicates incremental block-level changes between VM snapshots after dedupe and compression, providing up to 95 percent reduction in WAN utilization. Multiple systems replicating to a single system provide additional WAN efficiency because of global deduplication.

Intuitive, actionable dashboard information

Managing performance is as easy as managing capacity with intuitive performance fuel gauge. With Tintri VMstore, eliminate worries about VM storage performance. A unique "fuel gauge" gives you immediate visibility to both the available storage capacity and performance headroom on any Tintri VMstore appliance. For the first time, this gives you predictable storage performance with a single, easy-to-use metric. Two aggregate indicators with drilldown capability let you keep tabs on your VMs.

Detect problems before they begin with "top changer VMs" on the dashboard. The Tintri VMstore dashboard quickly identifies VMs with the most changes in performance or capacity requirements in the past seven days. You don't need to understand how VMs map to the storage components — all you need to know is the name of the VM — Tintri VMstore manages the details for you.